From Bogotá to Mexico City to Los Angeles to Austin, admirers of Gabriel García Márquez watched as the archivesof the novelist and journalist opened for viewing at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) on Oct. 21.
“We’re delighted to have been entrusted with this collection and we look forward to years of serving the research community that will draw from it,” said Stephen Enniss, director of the Ransom Center, a leading humanities research center in the United States, in a promotional video for the archive.
To celebrate the opening of the archive, the Ransom Center and the LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections are presenting the symposium, “Gabriel García Márquez: His Life and Legacy,” which will take place on the UT-Austin campus from Oct. 28 to 30.
Journalist and author Elena Poniatowska and novelist Salman Rushdie are scheduled to deliver keynote addresses at the symposium.
Other panels will explore “Gabo the Storyteller,” “Global Gabo,” “Gabo the Journalist” and “Cinematic Scribe and Muse.”
The “Gabo the Journalist” panel is scheduled for the morning of Oct. 30 and will feature panelists Jaime Abello, executive director of the García Márquez Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism (FNPI for its acronym in Spanish); Darío Arizmendi, radio program director of "Hoy por Hoy" on Caracol Radio; and colombian journalist Alberto Salcedo Ramos. Rosental Alves, director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, will moderate.
The symposium has sold out and registration is closed, but live webcasts in English and Spanish will be available starting at 6 p.m. CST on Oct. 28 at this link. You can also follow the symposium on social media with the hashtag #garciamarquezUT. A copy of the schedule noting the times of speeches and panels is available here.
The Knight Center will also produce posts about the symposium on the Journalism in the Americas blog.
The Ransom Center purchased the archive in 2014 for USD $2.2 million and plans to digitize the documents in 2016 so that they can be shared with the world. Some of the collection has already been digitized and is available here.
The archive contains manuscripts for 10 of García Márquez’s books and another unpublished book, more than 200 pieces of correspondence, fan mail, 43 photo albums, 22 scrapbooks, five computers and two typewriters. They are kept in a climate-controlled environment alongside archives of other famous writers including James Joyce, William Faulkner and Jorge Luis Borges.
The Ransom Center said it also has started to supplement the archive by acquiring materials like correspondence with other authors, notecards, typescripts and more. The archive is on display until Nov. 1.
“This archive gives us the opportunity to set the tone for the kinds of relationships we want to nurture and build between the University of Texas and Latin America that are based on mutual respect and shared interests in the scholarly and educational endeavors that we’re both pursuing,” said Charles Hale, Director of LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
